Conventional content switches search through packets of data to identify the nature of the traffic so that they make an intelligent switching decision based on the traffic content. These switches employ software that performs a serial search through the packets to determine data patterns. The fact that the search is serial in nature means that it starts with the first portion of the data, determines if the desired pattern is present then moves on to the next portion of the data. Additionally, conventional searches are limited to searching for one data pattern at a time. While this may provide acceptable performance when searching through short data packets, it is generally a relatively slow method that does not scale well when the search space becomes larger and/or the number of searched data patterns becomes greater.
It would thus be beneficial to have a method of searching for data patterns in a quick and efficient manner which scales well for larger search spaces and/or multiple search patterns.